


All The World's A Canvas: The Ages of Jadis

by creatureofhobbit



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-11
Updated: 2018-03-11
Packaged: 2019-03-30 01:15:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13939419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/creatureofhobbit/pseuds/creatureofhobbit
Summary: Slightly inspired by the "All the World's a Stage" speech in As You Like It.Jadis reflects on her paintings and her life.





	All The World's A Canvas: The Ages of Jadis

All the world’s a canvas, and all the men and women merely paint.

Not quite the quote from As You Like It that Jadis had learned in high school, but close enough. She’d been reminded of the original quote once she and her people had started life as the Scavengers, once she understood that their life was now a blank canvas, a chance to start over, and she and her people were the paint, the creators of the story. Not that some of those life stages probably applied anymore anyway, because most people now had the sense not to bring “the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” into the world the way it had become, and the hard truth was that none were likely to live long enough to become “the lean and slippered pantaloon”, instead going straight to “second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.” on reanimating. As for those who lived, they had no choice but to remain in the fourth stage, that of the soldier.

Yet Jadis chose to hang on to the remnants of her youth, the third age, much as she knew she had to accept the fourth. She’d paint objects that they found, people who came into her life, as she had done throughout her schooldays. And she’d paint the walkers, as Rick called them, to represent the way the world was now. Sometimes she’d paint the past, memories of her life before. She’d painted Smokey, her cat from when she was a child, had sculpted him out of metal, had used the canvas to keep some part of her past alive, to hold on to the Jadis she had been before everything changed.

The canvas was grey, to represent the way Jadis now felt about the way her life had been before.

 

She knew what had to be done. But that didn’t make it any easier. She couldn’t look at them and see walkers, but Tamiel, Brion, all her people, those who had followed her, who had led their lives as she did. And when she looked at them she understood it was her actions that had brought them to this; her changes of allegiance from Rick to Negan and back again leading to Simon’s massacre of her people. Their blood was on her hands; that must be recognised. As she led her former friends and allies towards the grinder, as their remains spattered on her canvas, Jadis did nothing to stop it: the part of her life immortalised by the cat was no more; this was her life now, the blood on her hands, the knowledge that she could have prevented this. She must leave that one up to immortalise her friends, to honour their memory, to remind herself every day to never act that way in an alliance again.

The canvas was red, to represent the blood of those who had been part of her life for so long, a tribute to her fallen friends.

 

She’d allow herself this day. With none left around her now, with no chance any more of an alliance with Rick Grimes’s people, and no wish to ever do any deals with Negan’s Saviors, Jadis now had to make a fresh start for herself. But not today, not until she had taken her time to grieve.

White had been the one colour she hated, as a child because of her name being the namesake of the White Witch in the Narnia books and the taunting she had faced at school over it, then as she became older and that ceased to matter, it was because the colour made her itch with irritation, a blank canvas screaming at her to be filled with colour.

Yet now she wants to take some white paint, throw it at all the works representing her life so far, the life that is no more.

The canvas is white, to represent the unknown, the blank slate, the fresh start that lay before her.

One day she’d paint again, paint the story of her life again. But not yet.


End file.
